June 2002

Volume 89, No. 1

Round Table

Self and Subject

Courtesy Jacquelyn Dowd Hall.

Do our own pasts and the ways we imagine them shape the histories we write, or are our lives and our constructions of them mostly irrelevant? Is self-revelation a useful way to acknowledge our standpoints, interests, and assumptions or more often a route to self-indulgence? In the round table “Self and Subject,” Richard White, Karen Halttunen, Philip J. Deloria, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, John Demos, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and Michael O’Brien explore the interplay of the stories we tell about our own lives and the stories we write about history.

How the Working Class Saved Capitalism: The New Labor History and The Devil and Miss Jones

An essay by the late Michael Rogin offers new ways of thinking about both the interaction of consumerism and labor militancy in the 1930s and the relationship of film and history. The Devil and Miss Jones (1941), a screwball comedy about a department store strike, is one of the very few New Deal era movies that directly addresses the period’s industrial battles. Rogin finds that the film’s intentions, conscious and unconscious, point to the brief historical conjunction of mass popular culture, New Deal consumerism, and labor organizing. Yet even as the film links popular culture with labor’s triumph, Rogin argues, it foreshadows the demise of labor’s power. (pp. 87–114) Read online >

Afterword

Is the Supreme Court Sometimes Irrelevant? Race and the Southern Criminal Justice System in the 1940s

Courtesy the Ocala Star-Banner.

Do judicial decisions produce social change? Drawing on National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp) records, Michael J. Klarman concludes that the Supreme Court’s first modern criminal-procedure rulings, intended to check the worst abuses of Jim Crow justice, had virtually no impact. Southern blacks continued to be excluded from juries, to be beaten into confessing, and to be incompetently represented. In contrast, the Court’s rulings against racially restrictive covenants and all-white election primaries led to visible change. Under certain conditions, then, Court rulings did indeed matter. And the process of litigation itself helped mobilize social protest and promote change. (pp. 119–53) Read online >

Whiteness Studies: The New History of Race in America

A burgeoning scholarship on whiteness is reshaping the study of race in history and related disciplines. Peter Kolchin offers a preliminary evaluation, focusing on the historical literature and paying particular attention to the work of two leading scholars in the field, David R. Roediger and Matthew Frye Jacobson. Kolchin praises whiteness studies for reinforcing our understanding of race as “constructed” but questions their imprecise definitions of “whiteness,” overreliance on whiteness to explain the American past, and parochialism in seeing whiteness as an exclusively American phenomenon. (pp. 154–73) Read online >

Letters to the Editor

Announcements

Recent Scholarship

On the cover:

Chinese illegal immigration across the northern and southern borders of the United States was part of a much larger transnational, and interracial, system of illicit trade. This illustration depicts an “American” pilot guiding a Chinese male toward the border. Other common guides were Canadian, American Indian, or Mexican. Reprinted from Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1891. See Erika Lee, “Enforcing the Borders: Chinese Exclusion along the U.S. Borders with Canada and Mexico, 1882–1924,” p. 54.

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